Flowers for Turing Update

In 2013, we thought we were going to do something small and cute, and we ended up doing something that was incredibly successful and made a lot of people happy. (You can read more about the project and the reaction we got on http://joereddington.com/projects/flowers-for-turing/)

We’re doing it again this year. We’d like to get 102 bunches of flowers for his 102nd Birthday. We’re looking for people working in Universities/organisations/groups and we’ve also started taking pledges from individuals. Last year people paid £14: £4 for the cost of the a bunch of flowers and the rest as a £10 donation to Bletchley Park Trust. We’re going to keep the same cost, although I’m hoping that I’ll be able to reduce the cost of the flowers (so more goes to charity).

We’re going to have a slightly more enabling charity this year – SpecialEffect is a UK based charity which uses video games and technology to enhance the quality of life of people with disabilities, I’ve spoken with them and they are very happy to support. If we get 102 bunches of flowers, then we raise over £1,000 for SpecialEffect and that will make a big big difference.

…the event is now in 7 days, so we should let you know where we are.

This is the current state of the paypal account:

…which I’m very proud of, but I really hope we can do more. This is made up of pledges from the following (where a company or university is listed this should be read as staff/students/alumni/hangers-on from company or university, rather than any endorsement from the place itself – this is very definitely a grassroots thing):

Aberdeen University (several bunches)

Andy Longhurst (independent)

Auckland Bioengineering Institute

Audionary special projects

University of California, Berkeley

Cambridge University

CrankyFlamingo (Reddit)

Edge Hill College(several bunches)

Goldsmiths

Harvard University

Washington

Heriot-Watt

IT University of Copenhagen

Leeds Univeristy

Newcastle University

Radboud University Nijmegen

Technical University of Denmark

Spies-Sabin family

United states of Awesome (Made up. I think)

Univeristy of Iceland

University of Hertfordshire

University of New South Wales

University of Toronto

University of York

This is only the people who have definitely paid – there are a wide range of people that have committed but haven’t yet sent funds though.

To give some accountability information: we’ll be releasing a) the donation going to Special Effect b) the receipt from the followers and c) the set of participating universities/organisations/individuals, which should be (I think) the right balance between accountability and letting people have (relative) anonymity (with a note if there are more than one bunch from a group). Because we’ve had some much larger donations we are also going to have to release the set of donation amounts to make that work. So there will pictures of the format:

If you’d like to get involved please mail me at joe@joereddington.com – if you’d like to make it *really* quick you can pledge directly with PayPal (joe.reddington@gmail.com). If you are doing a direct PayPal pledge please make it clear how you would like to be credited (for example your university company or just your name) because that makes my life *vastly* easier later on

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Joe Reddington " It's a sensible point (and it's clearly behind some of the @Marcus4Nuneaton choices). I found myself wondering if there was shades of this: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/21/boris-johnson-twitter-mayor - if you are going to... " – The list of MPs changing... Mar 27, 9:49 PM